Google campfire event was last night and I was honored to be invited to such a exclusive event called Campfire One.  It was the first anniversary of App Engine and Google poured out the announcements.

Cnet’s Stephen Shankland has a good post on the event with some great photos. (Nice job Stephen).  I have more on this that I am developing a deeper angle than what was reported by Stephen.  Cnet has a great review of the event.  The implications of the SDC (Secure Data Connector) and Java are the most significant announcements.  Some other great stuff is the Cron support and the ability to buy your way into more service. Nice to see the focus on user experience and the front end via Google web toolkit (GWT) and GWT cross-compiler. I really liked the notion of the cross compiler and think that might be a very compelling feature.

All good stuff last night – all standards based.  The one unexpected surprise that impressed me – senior exec David Girouard, who runs Google Enterprise, was tweeting on the event from the east coast (D.C).

Here is some highlights from Cnet.  Expect more here at SiliconAngle.com later especially on how this might reshape the Unified Communications market – this will be developing pun intended.

The idea of cloud computing is catching on, and Google is a major proponent. Even Microsoft, whose twin cash cows of Windows and Office today are tethered to physical machines, plans cloud-based versions of both those products.

About 150,000 developers have built 50,000 applications on App Engine so far, Google said, and those apps draw about 100 million page views per day.

Cloud computing can bring penalties such as primitive user interfaces, long waits for services to respond, and problems when the network is down or unavailable. In-house computing systems aren’t infallible, but when cloud computing services fail, customers are beholden to another company’s skills at restoring them.

Google also announced a handful of other developments that make App Engine more useful for regular programmers:

• Through a feature called Secure Data Connector, App Engine can incorporate private data stored servers behind company firewalls, said App Engine Product Manager Andrew Bowers. For example, information from a company’s sales database can be retrieved by App Engine and displayed in a Google Docs chart.

• Using a command called “cron,” App Engine can perform some automated actions timed in advance to take place, such as collecting daily statistics and e-mailing them to an administrator, Bowers said.

• App Engine is getting better tools for import and, later this week, export, so it’s easier to move information stored in conventional databases to App Engine and back, said App Engine Product Manager Mike Repass. For example, custom instructions can be applied to help convert the data.